Small world … the Songdo aerotropolis hopes to cash in on its proximity to a quarter of the world's population. Photograph: HG Esch/KPF/The Washington Post

The scene outside the cab window is ominous: six lanes of black sedans, apple-green buses and scooters sit crammed fender-to-fender, their shrill horns and screeching brakes piercing Seoul's hazy, exhaust-choked air. Before one even arrives in Songdo, it's easy to understand its appeal.

Over the past decade, the South Korean city of Songdo has sprung up on 600 hectares of reclaimed land on the Yellow Sea, 65km south of Seoul. Linked by a 12km bridge to Incheon International Airport, the city is hailed as an experimental prototype of the aerotropolis, an urban development concept with the potential to significantly affect the way we travel.

What is an aerotropolis? At its simplest, it's a city built around an airport. Instead of sticking an airport on the outskirts of an existing city, building a city around the airport allows for faster movement of goods and people. And as Greg Lindsay, co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, argues, in the era of globalisation, efficiency is the key. Lindsay believes that the old real-estate rule of "location, location, location" is being swapped for the new rule of "accessibility, accessibility, accessibility".

"Cities have always formed around transportation – ports and harbours and then train stations," says Lindsay, pointing to Boston, New York and Chicago as examples. "Air travel is the only way to connect globally, and now, more frequently, cities will grow around airports."

Even 10 years ago, when Songdo's development first began, the aerotropolis wasn't a well-known notion. "We weren't cognisant of the aerotropolis concept at the time," says Jonathan Thorpe, senior executive vice-president and chief investment officer of Gale International, the development firm behind Songdo. "It just made sense."

In 2001, South Korea approached the New York-based firm about developing a city that, by virtue of its proximity to the newly opened airport in Incheon, would attract multinational corporations and potentially turn the region into the world's gateway to north-east Asia. "The idea was that it would be an international business district and that foreigners would find this a convenient place to set up business," says Thomas Hubbard, who served as US ambassador to South Korea when the project began. "The model was Singapore."

Understanding the mission of attracting new western business, Gale has built state-of-the-art, high-tech office buildings, apartments, shops and schools, imported elements from other cities, such as New York's Central Park, and wooed Jack Nicklaus into building one of his iconic golf clubs.

Much of Songdo has still to be built, but even as it is under continuing construction, there are signs that point to its becoming an important business and residential hub. Last autumn, the UN selected the city as the home of its new Green Climate Fund agency. Initial estimates expect 500 employees and their families to move to Songdo.

While Songdo's status as a sustainable city helped in its successful bid to house the Green Climate Fund, so did its proximity to Incheon International Airport. "You land at the airport and there's a convention centre, a hotel, a golf course," says Lindsay. "Business travellers already live out of conference hotels; now you're seeing conference cities. You still go to Seoul if you have leisure time, but this is the hyper-efficient movement of people. This is taking the scale of business travel to the extreme."

If accessibility and efficiency are key to the business traveller, the aerotropolis's impact is clear. In some instances, the effect on leisure traveller is equally, garishly obvious.

Across the bridge from Songdo, Incheon airport is building a massive playland to rival Macau and Las Vegas. It is already the No 1 duty-free airport in the world, with $1.53bn in sales last year.

Outside the terminal, on the man-made island where it sits, development is underway on a mega-resort and casino, a water park, a shopping mall and several hotels. By the end of the decade, this new pleasure carnival will open and connect back to the airport by a magnetic levitation train that will make a 33-mile loop around the entire island.

"The concept of an airport is changing," says Min-Jae Chun, director of the Airport City Development Group. "In the past it was just about transportation. If you want to progress, you have to create a destination."

A quarter of the world's population is within three-and-a-half hours of Incheon, and by 2018, the airport anticipates 62 million visitors a year, with 65% coming from Japan and China. "These cities are being built as tourism infrastructure for people who can now afford to travel," says Lindsay. "These are the mega-resorts for the world's emerging middle class."

The aerotropolis, however, does cause other, less readily obvious ripples in how we travel. "Once you build these infrastructures and you make travel more efficient, you change global travel patterns," says Lindsay. "It opens up places. It makes it easier to create hubs and connect. It leads to a rise in travel destinations we never thought of before or that were really difficult to get to."

He points to Dubai as the ultimate example. "It was barely on the map 20 years ago," he says. But after spending $500m on a new concourse, and after Emirates airline acquired several new long-haul jets, the city became an important hub, linking places that had never been connected before.

"The Seychelles becomes easier to reach because you can stop over in Dubai," says Lindsay.

"In Africa there are 14 aerotropolises being built. And in places like the Middle East and Asia, people are sitting down and building cities from scratch around the airport. China alone is building the equivalent of Rome every week. It will be interesting to see what destinations open up."

• This article appeared in the Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from the Washington Post

Next week Quito's infamous airport will move, offering an easier place for pilots. Kai Tak, in Hong Kong, the most precarious of landings where you could see washing hanging on lines, no longer exists. But thrill seekers can still fly to Cusco, Innsbruck, Kathmandu or St Barts, to name a few. Look away if you are scared of flying